I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr. -- I Have a Dream

My Sainted Aunt is talking like Mr. Grady O’Hanlon, who left his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation.

Harper Lee -- Go Set a Watchman

Carthage had become a bit (a very tiny bit) less Caucasian while I was away, but it was still so severely segregated that the only people of color I saw in my daily routine tended to be occupational roamers: delivery men, medics, postal workers.

Gillian Flynn -- Gone Girl

African Americans lived in racially segregated ghettos isolated by railroad tracks within small towns or in "colored sections" in the country.

Bryan Stevenson -- Just Mercy

Theirs was the only city in New Jersey with sex-segregated public high schools, Jefferson for boys, Battin for girls.

Judy Blume -- In the Unlikely Event

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In the segregated Mexican camp, with my grandfather, she lived much like the characters in the story.

Pam Munoz Ryan -- Esperanza Rising

Black students had enrolled in segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the University of Alabama.

Christopher Paul Curtis -- The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963

The rules of segregation don’t apply.

Lauren Oliver -- Delirium

Eighteen children had never seen a hill—eighteen children had never heard the words integration and segregation.

Pat Conroy -- The Water is Wide

Had the Michigan sergeant lived to witness the North’s retreat from Reconstruction in the 1870s and the South’s disfranchisement and formalized segregation of blacks in the 1890s, he might have wondered whether the abolition of slavery had revolutionized everything after all.

James M. McPherson -- What They Fought For - 1861-1865

He had scrimped and saved enough money to build a home for elderly Jews in Hilversum—for the elderly of all faiths, in fact, for Willem was against any system of segregation.

Corrie Ten Boom -- The Hiding Place

"We don’t segregate by color here.

Alexandra Bracken -- The Darkest Minds

He became a leading activist in the movement toward segregation, and was one of the fathers of the idea of separate "ghetto benches" for Jewish students.

He saw no reason to keep flowers separated from tomatoes and herbs segregated in a corner.

Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones

This was 1951 in Baltimore, segregation was law, and it was understood that black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgment.

Rebecca Skloot -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Maya Angelou -- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

If Lewis was willing to segregate his work life from his home life, why couldn’t Sterling College do the same?

Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes

On the outskirts of the arena, right beside the entrance and carefully segregated from the men, sat the women who worked for Capricorn.

Cornelia Funke -- Inkheart

The segregated schools came as a complete surprise to Mommy, who had not even considered that problem, and the southern vibe of the city-anything south of Canal Street in Manhattan was the South to us-brought back unpleasant memories for Mommy.

James McBride -- The Color of Water

’I mean, it’s the same kind of nonsense as werewolf segregation, isn’t it?

J.K. Rowling -- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Salvagings are always segregated.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

I am not a man for segregation, but it is a pity that we are not apart.

Alan Paton -- Cry, the Beloved Country

The bitter riots were sparked by King’s assassination, but the fuels that kept them burning were the preexisting conditions: illegal but strictly enforced racial segregation, economic contraction, and an unresponsive political system.

Wes Moore -- The Other Wes Moore

Though streetcars are not segregated in New Orleans, I took a seat near the back.

John Howard Griffin -- Black Like Me

But this neatness, the neatness of Dante, was in the orderly sectioning and segregating of all levels of evil and decay.

Toni Morrison -- The Bluest Eye

"Crimes such as the Bigger Thomas murders could be lessened by segregating all Negroes in parks, playgrounds, caf"s, theatres, and street cars.

Richard Wright -- Native Son

II As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a face flushed with food and dancing.

Edith Wharton -- Ethan Frome

The kids did what came naturally: segregated themselves based on race.

Ron Suskind -- A Hope in the Unseen

A segregation of the Turkish fleet: For do but stand upon the foaming shore, The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds; The wind-shak’d surge, with high and monstrous main, Seems to cast water on the burning Bear, And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole; I never did like molestation view On the enchafed flood.

William Shakespeare -- Othello, the Moor of Venice

The patio is sex segregated-the men sit to one side, smoking their cigars and tinkling their rum drinks.

Julia Alvarez -- How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Four feet of the school yard faced on Francie’s yard and was segregated from it by an iron mesh fence.

Betty Smith -- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Florida was still pretty segregated, so the cultural mix was unique and mostly peaceful—blacks, whites, Hispanics, and some Seminoles.

Jack Gantos -- Hole in My Life

The food was politely segregated, ever since the episode a few years ago when one of Stewart’s friends, a Buddhist vegan, accidentally mistook a crab puff for a wheatfree biscuit.

Sarah Dessen -- Dreamland

And on the other side of the waiting room, segregated by some chairs and modern time, were Vlad, a breathless Marion, and at least twenty other warriors and maidens, all decked out in full medieval regalia.

Sarah Dessen -- Someone Like You

The gym classes at Stony Brook were normally segregated, boys from girls.

D.J. Machale -- The Merchant of Death

In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges.

W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk

The increasing segregation of the two ethnicities, and the ever-growing fear between them, which made violence, especially preemptive violence, a rational strategy for self-defense.

Tracy Kidder -- Strength in What Remains

Wallace had lost his first run for governor because he claimed he was "out-niggered," and vowed never to lose another race because he seemed soft on segregation.

Rick Bragg -- All Over but the Shoutin’

And why should I restrict myself, segregate myself? I was a spokesman-why shouldn’t I speak about women, or any other subject?

Ralph Ellison -- Invisible Man

At the conclusion of the two-week trial, Woodall announced that he’d narrowed the field down to two finalists: Cathy O’Dowd, twenty-six, a white journalism instructor with limited mountaineering experience whose father is the director of Anglo American, the largest company in South Africa; and Deshun Deysel, twenty-five, a black physical-education teacher with no previous climbing experience whatsoever who’d grown up in a segregated township.

Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air

A pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement and one of the principal organizers of the March on Washington in 1963, Lewis often risked his life to challenge segregation during the Freedom Rides and to secure the right to vote for African Americans.

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

It had a steel divider running along the center, segregating the white prisoners from the Africans.

Nelson Mandela -- Long Walk to Freedom

A vicious person, always affecting the same air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any suspicion of his vices, has no register, no gauge at hand from which he may ascertain bow far those vices (their continuous growth being imperceptible by himself) have gradually segregated him from the normal ways of life.

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

The principal knew Moon as a good teacher and bona fide musician who had played trombone in Cleveland’s lauded all-black Navy band, an association that came into being because of segregation, so he lured Moon from another public school.